Throughout this application, various publications are referenced by author and date within the text. Full citations for these publications may be found listed alphabetically at the end of the specification immediately preceding the claims. All patents, patent applications and publications cited herein, whether supra or infra, are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety. The disclosures of these publications in their entireties are hereby incorporated by reference into this application in order to more fully describe the state of the art as known to those skilled therein as of the date of the invention described and claimed herein.
Conventional cancer therapy often involves surgery followed by repeated rounds of chemotherapy and/or radiation (Patterson and Harris, 1999). Although this approach can in specific instances result in complete cancer remission, in the majority of cases it is associated with severe toxic side effects and often results in only a transient abatement of the disease-state. An alternate approach for treating cancer employs agents that are potentially less toxic and which modulate the differentiation of tumor cells, a process termed “differentiation therapy” (Huberman and Callaham, 1979; Sachs, 1980; Scott and Maercklein, 1985; Waxman et al., 1991; Jiang et al., 1994; Waxman, 1995; Scott, 1997; Tamayo et al., 1999).